Decluttering the Mailbox

Every day when I get home from work, the first thing I do is sort the mail. I would say that 99% of the mail we receive is junk - credit card offers, catalogs, other nonsense. I would much rather open an empty mailbox than go through all of the junk we get every day. I recently found this great post on Pinterest about decluttering the office and it mentioned some great ideas for decluttering the mail.

First I created an account on Mail Preference Service. This is a site that manages direct marketing mail, like coupons from businesses. There are several options, you can even go through an exhaustive list of businesses and choose only those you would like to receive coupons from. I prefer to get my coupons online, so I selected "remove from all". Hopefully, within the next couple of weeks, we will be seeing fewer coupons in our mailbox!

Next, I went to Opt Out Prescreen, run by the Consumer Credit Reporting Agency, to opt out of those pesky credit card offers that come in the mail. Every year when I check my credit report, it is littered with credit card companies requesting my information to send me offers. Well, I don't know about you, but we have enough credit cards and we really don't need any more. If I want to sign up for a new credit card, it certainly won't be through a pre-screened offer. On this website, you can select to opt out of all offers for 5 years, or permanently. You might be thinking "well obviously I would select permanently!" They don't make it easy. You can opt out for 5 years with the click of a button, but you need to mail in a signed form to opt out for life. I filled out one of these for both my husband and myself and sent them away in the mail the other day. It should take a few weeks for full effect, but I am certainly looking forward to a decluttered mailbox!

So what is next for organizing the mail we do want? My husband gets tons of mail that he waits days to deal with. I hate seeing it laying around the house, so I went in search of a letter sorter. I went to Etsy and quickly found exactly what I was looking for. Below is a picture of a beautiful vintage letter sorter that is currently on it's way, found Here.

My plan is to refinish the wood stain and affix new labels with my name, my husband's name, and a label for "Outgoing" mail. Will update when it's finished!